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Genuitec promotes patent protection for customers

Genuitec are now promoting the patent immunity of their products and casting doubts upon the patent status of object relation mapping (ORM) libraries from other vendors. The move comes following the settlement of a case between Genuitec and Software Tree over the use of object relational mapping in open source products such as Hibernate, Spring, EclipseLink, TopLink and Open JPA. Genuitec produce MyEclipse, a J2EE IDE development tool suite, which allows developers to work with these and other database technologies to create enterprise applications.

In a statement, the company says "Enterprises utilising any of these technologies without Genuitec products can potentially run the risk of exposure to future litigation". The company says that it "acted decisively to protect customers". The IDE vendor says that the settlement includes an agreement that "Genuitec products are immune from possible patent infringements on their ORM technology distributions. This license extends to Genuitec customers, allowing the legal use for design and run-time technologies, and covers any ORM libraries shipped with Genuitec products including Hibernate, Spring, EclipseLink, TopLink, and Open JPA".

The company's blog posting also points out that Software Tree is currently in litigation proceedings with HP, Dell and Red Hat. In Red Hat's case, Software Tree filed a lawsuit in March 2009. The patent in question is number 6,163,776 – System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and a relational system. Software Tree have previously come to agreements or settlements with IBM in August 2009 and Oracle in December 2009.